Stories by George Musser

Designing machines to think like humans provides insight into intelligence itself

Here’s how large language models, or LLMs, actually work. 

Researchers are still struggling to understand how AI models trained to parrot Internet text can perform advanced tasks such as running code, playing games and trying to break up a marriage

Insights from Deaf and autistic communities could finally make office spaces better for everyone. 

Open-office designs create productivity and health problems. New insights from Deaf and autistic communities could fix them

Quantum entanglement and spacetime wormholes helped to solve a long-standing quandary

How close can physics bring us to a truly fundamental understanding of the world?

How machines could learn creativity and common sense, among other human qualities

More than two million internet respondents pondered dilemmas to consider in letting vehicles make moral choices

Physicists believe that at the tiniest scales, space emerges from quanta. What might these building blocks look like?

A microwave radiometer onboard the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter could soon reveal where and how the giant planet formed

After a do-or-die engine burn the second spacecraft ever to orbit Jupiter is preparing to revolutionize our view of the giant planet 

Poised to enter Jovian orbit on July 4, the NASA spacecraft is set to probe the gas giant’s deepest mysteries

Our sense of the universe as an orderly expanse where events happen in absolute locations is an illusion

Einstein’s assertion that God does not play dice with the universe has been misinterpreted

High-resolution images of the icy worlds reveal towering mountains, yawning canyons and perhaps hints of a subsurface ocean

Though the dwarf planet is now behind it, the spacecraft’s science returns are only just beginning

Could time end? Yes. And no. Recent work in physics suggests a resolution to the paradox

Physicists can't seem to find the time—literally. Can philosophers help?

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, one of the creators of loop quantum gravity, and his collaborator Hal Haggard have just come out with a new paper on black holes.

It’s lucky that debates over the meaning of quantum mechanics are so entertaining, because they seem to go on forever. The sundry proposed interpretations make the same experimental predictions, so many people fret that there’ll never be a way to decide among them.

In 1954 the renowned physicist Enrico Fermi did a simple but depressing calculation about future particle accelerators. To create particles with an energy of 3 teraelectron-volts, he estimated, you’d have to build a ring 8,000 kilometers in radius at a cost of $170 billion.

Last year I got talking to theoretical physicist Aron Wall about the thermodynamics of quantum gravity. Now that's a deceptively beautiful phrase: in four words, you get three of the deepest areas in modern science.

In our February issue, Scientific American had an article on the phenomenon of liquid-rope coiling--the way that viscous fluids curl as they fall onto a surface, forming what looks like a miniature basket.